Living Room (visitor loop)

I went through an interesting time earlier this Summer and stopped working on things for an extended period. It amounted to a pause of about two months, which doesn’t seem so long now, but at the time felt like the end of the world. But I am feeling much better now, and creatively refreshed as well.

Lately I’ve been into the idea of documenting mundane events and then creating many different “versions” of them. Written statement of the event, storytelling version, audio recording, video, embellished, the same event from another perspective, recreated physically again as a simulation for someone else to experience. I’ve also been thinking about how to blend different techniques I’ve developed in new ways.

This video (excerpt) is part of that larger project. It’s a 54 second loop. I think of loops as sharing certain qualities with memories. Imagine watching a 3 minute sequence a single time, followed by a 20 second excerpt from it on an endless loop. Over time, the memories of the full sequence would become weaker. The shorter looping excerpt, besides being the dominant object of immediate perception, would take on new meanings through its repetition. Any sequence of data that is looped becomes part of a larger pattern. This is true no matter how random or nonsensical the original sequence. Loops can be used to create a second-order perspective on time and data.

I cut down a 30 fps video to a series of key frames, then did some manual morph editing to create slithery connections between them all. I think of this as a combination of several different “versions” of the mundane event. I tried to approach the audio from a foley sound artist’s perspective. The dimensions (1080×1920, portrait orientation) are unusual for viewing on a computer screen, but I think of this clip as a smaller part of a larger physical project, where it will (hopefully) work better in context.